The late Simon Leys, the great Sinologist and literary essayist, once wrote a little essay on the first lines of novels. He was inspired to do so by having picked up G. K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill in a second-hand bookshop and read its first words: "The human race, to which so ...
... such stuff as madmen Tongue, and brain not; either both, or nothing, Or senseless speaking, or a speaking such As sense cannot untie. Cymbeline, Act 1, scene v All doctors have noticed that when one ...
No one who reads Seyyid Qutb's book Milestones could be in any doubt that the destruction of ancient monuments by ISIS or the Taliban is perfectly in keeping with Islamist thought. Milestones is an important book not because of its merits, either intellectual or literary, but because of its ...
Self-blame is no doubt salutary when one is truly blameworthy, but there is also a kind of self-blame that is exaggerated, insincere, grandiose, and exhibitionistic. It is also abstract and collective rather than individual; it is the kind of self-blame that intellectuals specialize in expressing ...
Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier) was one of the people killed in the attack on Charlie Hebdo on 7 January this year. He was a writer and editor as well as a cartoonist, and recently I bought a slim volume of his articles called A Little Treatise of Intolerance. It was, in a way, the least I ...
Often I have thought, or supposed, that there must be a single unifying explanation of all the woes or social problems of the Western world, if only I could find it. But I have not found it: the nearest I have come to explaining the rise of drug-taking, minor incivility, psychological distress, ...
Whether looseness of language is a consequence or a cause of looseness of thought I cannot say. No doubt it is sometimes the one and sometimes the other. Perhaps"to indulge in a little looseness of thought and language of my own"the relationship between them is dialectical. But certainly ...
One little phrase in Le Monde's report of an incident in Nice"in which a man aged 30 called Moussa Coulibaly attacked with a knife three soldiers guarding a Jewish community center"caught my attention: rien de bien méchant, nothing very bad. It was used in describing his prior ...
"Last night hope for real change brought the smiles back to Greek faces after five long years": that was a fairly representative statement in the British left-wing press on the day following the Greek election. And the photos that usually accompanied such statements did indeed show numbers ...
Generally I don"t remember my dreams, and to judge by the few that I do remember I am rather glad that I don"t. Nor do I believe, pace Freud, that they are the royal road to the unconscious, still less that they are auguries of the future. On the contrary, I think that they are the ...
